First Blood
by Vixen of Light
Summary: Regulus' first taste of blood, potion and truth...


**He doesn't sleep any more, all the hours blur into one long, tormenting Pensieve scene behind his eyeballs; in his ears the sound of screams and laughter and in his nostrils the smell of blood, vomit and smoke.**

**He remembers the way Mulcibar glanced at him on his knees in the bushes. "Hasn't the little boy ever seen a Mudblood up close?"**

**Bellatrix briefly patted his shoulder, half condescending, half amused. "They do make you sick, don't they? I wasn't expecting it to be literal," she sneered a little, "But it's hard, the first time you've seen them, I suppose." Her voice rose a touch, her eyes glittering. "Before the Dark Lord they could have just carried on existing in our world, besmirching it, but now, now, we can..." she broke off, chest heaving, the fervour of her words too much for her to contain. In the light of the Mark, her face glows sickly green.**

**He nods, forcing himself to stand, to look at her. He remembers, incongruously, that their assumptions weren't as mad as they seemed. The first time Narcissa was taken to Diagon Alley he had been dragged along and her pale face had actually blanched at the 'lower orders' her mother had pointed out to her. She had pressed a silk handkerchief to her thin lips and turned her face away. Her mother had stroked her hair affectionately.**

**Bellatrix strides off, not wasting another glance on him. He stumbles after her, listening to the snickers of those more brutal, those who genuinely enjoyed the killing - "...it's the pathetic way they beg, like it makes a difference!" – and worst, oh god, worst because he used to be able to be like this, the faintly bored conversation of those who were just working for the cause, who don't even see the figures before them, don't see anything more than animals who have to be culled.**

**Now he sees them. He sees the mother clinging to her children, hiding their faces in her robes, trying so desperately to smother her screams because if they get out of this, that way her children may not have so many nightmares. If she can pretend it's all normal. **

**He sees her unable to hold back her agony as Bellatrix twists her limbs out of shape, slashes her face, burns down her arms and legs. Sees the woman fling herself, bleeding and broke, in front her children as Dolohov turns a black-toothed grin on them and raises his wand. **

"**Come on, Black, first blood?" Rodolphus LeStrange inclines his head and gestures politely towards the immobilised husband, still seated in his chair, eyes forced open to watch what they watch. A tear rolls down his cheek. **

**He turns away from the mother and her children, although the flash of green light in the corner of his eye is enough. He raises his wand, and kills the man. **

**LeStrange shrugs. "Someone will need to teach you some hexes," he commented. "Might as well play before you exterminate." He raises his voice. "Bella, your little cousin isn't as inventive as you, my dear,"**

**Bella glances away from the pile of bones and blood that still screamed with the voice of a child. The blood is as red as his own, he thinks, incongruously. It might have had the decency to be discoloured, for there to be some visible sign that what they – he – was doing was **_**right**_**, that they were better. They shouldn't look like him under the skin. **

"**We can teach him," Bellatrix snorted. "He always was more interested in Quidditch and childishness. He'll learn." She turned back to her task, smiling as she had when she watched the house-elf writhe under her practised hexes: concentration on making sure the job was well done, happiness at doing something she truly enjoyed. **

**It shouldn't have been like this.**

**He sat up in his bed, staring into the formless darkness, afraid of the sounds in his head and the uncertainly, dragging him into spiralling madness. At Hogwarts, it had been so easy. To look down on the Mudbloods, because even though they walked and talked like him they were less, they should not have been allowed to be there, pretending to be as good as him. How dare they? He would echo the words in his father's voice, and believe them utterly. He was born to nobility, to be a different breed to these lower beings, and here they were, allowed to associate with him. It was a loathsome thought, it dirtied him by association. It had been easy to hate his brother for abandoning him for something incomprehensible, to deny his birthright. **

**He wondered if he had ever had a single conversation with a Muggleborn. Not a passing sneer, not a brush off in the corridor, a true conversation. He suspected not. He had been **_**certain**_**, he had been so damn sure of it all. It all made **_**sense**_**. There was no sense now. Now he jumped at shadows and had to face people – for now he knew they were **_**people**_** – that the next day he might kill when he couldn't even face his own reflection in a mirror. **

**The sun rose, eventually. It seeped through the curtains like blood **_**(don't think of that!)**_** and burned his eyes, filtered through the pounding headache, making him choke, bile and nausea filling him though the haze of sleeplessness. The collage of Death Eater activity blurred slowly into focus on the opposite wall. He had to believe it was the truth. He had, once. He was right, they were right, this was...**_**right**_**. It was right to kill and torture those less than him **_**(but who was less than who? Who was he?)**_** and to purify the world, to believe everything that had ever been told to him.**

**For the first time, he realised how brave Sirius had truly been to make up his own mind. Right or wrong – he could no longer tell – Sirius had done something...incredible. To face that your whole world was – perhaps – wrong...**

**He wished he knew something for certain. He wished he could have just carried on going to Death Eater meetings and chanting and worshipping and never have interacted with the outside world. He wished he had stuck to words, not blood **_**(but it was blood that was the cause, the beginning and end of it all)**_**. **

**When Kreacher came home to him, sobbing and writhing, it had been the beginning of the end.**

**When covert, feverish research turned up that Lord Voldemort was nothing more than Tom Riddle, a Halfblood whose link to Slytherin was, in the words of Borgin, "a beggar woman", that all this hadn't even been in the service of a true Pureblood noble, the world stopped turning for him. There was no way out. He wondered if he even wanted there to be. Where do you go when it turns out your world was built on lies?**

"**Come on, Black, first blood?" The screams. The scent of vomit, the pain, the tear on the man's cheek. He swallowed the last goblet of the potion, forced the locket into Kreacher's shaking hand, dropped his replacement in and collapsed, wept, screamed. There wasn't even unconsciousness to ease his pain. **

**No thought. Crawled to the water's edge. Stared into the water. Saw dead eyes stare back **_**(didn't matter what their blood was. Mudbloods and Pure served the Halfblood in death).**_** Drank. Water trembled.**

"**Get out of here, Kreacher," he gasped, water dripping down his face. "Go home, go..." The elf wailed, but obeyed. **

**On his knees again, in the darkness, praying, sobbing, feeling a hand on his shoulder. It could have been that night. The hand dragged at his robes, pulled him forward, and perhaps he could have resisted but the churning in his stomach, the cold in his limbs, the sound of the screams in his head, were so soporific he had no strength to fight. They pulled him into their embrace, pulled his head into the water.**

**Only then, when he found his eyes meeting beneath the water those of a corpse, realised in a few weeks it would be his face with the flesh peeling off to the bone beneath **_**(a pile of blood and bones, screaming with the voice of a child)**_** that he pulled back, forced his head above water and screamed, screamed from the bottom of his lungs for anyone, anyone to save him, he'd make it better, he'd do something, anything, just don't let them take him **_**(and did you listen when others screamed those words to you?)**_** but they tore at his head and arms, pulled him in, down, further, deeper... **


End file.
